Mechanical Turk Suspensions and General Speculation

[steven munoz]

Hi i just got my account suspended today and was wondering if you could help me recover my account. I would really appreciate it .

 

[suprshady]

Heres my suspension email! No warning, just the ban hammer. Its probably because I registered in the states, but now live outside of the country.

What yall think? Im gonna PM the mods for the emails.

Greetings from Amazon Mechanical Turk,
We regret to inform you that your Amazon Mechanical Turk account has been suspended effective immediately. Your account was closed for not providing true and accurate information about your location during the registration process, which violates section 1a of our Participation Agreement. You can review the complete Participation Agreement at
Once all of your submitted HITs have been approved or rejected, we will disburse your account balance to your primary disbursement method.
If you have questions, or believe this decision was made in error, you may email us using the Contact Us form on our Worker website
Regards,
Amazon Mechanical Turk

 

[Metallica]

Hey guys,

I just wanted to clarify that you need to contact ME for the emails. I had to get the moderators' permission to do that in the first place, they otherwise have no involvement in this.

Thanks

S @suprshady I will be PMing you shortly.

 

[Metallica]

Updated the thread with the suspension reason shown directly above my last post. I'm glad Amazon is giving an actual explanation as to why you were suspended now. This may just be a canned response like the others, but this is the first time I've ever seen this suspension reason; I'm just making assumptions.

Greetings from Amazon Mechanical Turk,
We regret to inform you that your Amazon Mechanical Turk account has been suspended effective immediately. Your account was closed for not providing true and accurate information about your location during the registration process, which violates section 1a of our Participation Agreement. You can review the complete Participation Agreement at
Once all of your submitted HITs have been approved or rejected, we will disburse your account balance to your primary disbursement method.
If you have questions, or believe this decision was made in error, you may email us using the Contact Us form on our Worker website
Regards,
Amazon Mechanical Turk

 

[imGreek]

Welp...woke up to something not fun this morning. When I log into my account it says "There is a problem with your Amazon Mechanical Turk account
This account has been suspended by the Amazon Mechanical Turk team."

MTurk Master, 98.9 approval rating, almost half a million hits completed. Was working last night perfectly fine and now this. No email from Amazon in my inbox, no warning, nothing. No emails about getting blocked. Lost for words. Feels like the rug has been pulled out from under me. Shot two emails out. Any advice?

 

[jan]

Welp...woke up to something not fun this morning. When I log into my account it says "There is a problem with your Amazon Mechanical Turk account
This account has been suspended by the Amazon Mechanical Turk team."

MTurk Master, 98.9 approval rating, almost half a million hits completed. Was working last night perfectly fine and now this. No email from Amazon in my inbox, no warning, nothing. No emails about getting blocked. Lost for words. Feels like the rug has been pulled out from under me. Shot two emails out. Any advice?

I'm so sorry!
Did you read through this thread? You need to start by getting them to review what happened....and finding out any information that you can. I'd wait and see what they send back, at this point - and then go from t here. Many people have been successful at getting back their accounts and (as you know) - some haven't . But your first step is information. You need to understand what happened (and why).

 

[imGreek]

I'm so sorry!
Did you read through this thread? You need to start by getting them to review what happened....and finding out any information that you can. I'd wait and see what they send back, at this point - and then go from t here. Many people have been successful at getting back their accounts and (as you know) - some haven't . But your first step is information. You need to understand what happened (and why).

Yeah, that's the biggest thing. I looked through the last 6 months of emails and found nothing. No emails about a block or a warning or anything. Just logged in and saw that. I emailed the jeff@amazon email and mturk-worker-support. I also sent the OP a message. Hopefully something can be done.

 

[Metallica]

Yeah, that's the biggest thing. I looked through the last 6 months of emails and found nothing. No emails about a block or a warning or anything. Just logged in and saw that. I emailed the jeff@amazon email and mturk-worker-support. I also sent the OP a message. Hopefully something can be done.

I PMed you the extra emails and such. Going forward, would you mind sharing what they tell you with us? I like to keep my thread as up-to-date as possible.

And just a general FYI, I've been getting a metric shit ton of "help with my suspension" PMs this month. Something weird is going on with Amazon.

 

[imGreek]

I PMed you the extra emails and such. Going forward, would you mind sharing what they tell you with us? I like to keep my thread as up-to-date as possible.

And just a general FYI, I've been getting a metric shit ton of "help with my suspension" PMs this month. Something weird is going on with Amazon.

I certainly will do so. Thanks for PM'ing me back.

Yeah, everything seems a little strange with this situation. Trying to stay positive it was something they did and a system error. Who knows

 

[Kadauchi]

I certainly will do so. Thanks for PM'ing me back.

Yeah, everything seems a little strange with this situation. Trying to stay positive it was something they did and a system error. Who knows

How many rejections do you have?

 

[Metallica]

4 PMs about suspensions today

 

[Persephone78]

4 PMs about suspensions today

Ask the Pmers if they had Stax installed.

 

[Tjololo]

FYI someone on reddit got this email today, looks like a little more information is given about why your account is suspended. Emphasis mine:


Greetings from Amazon Mechanical Turk,

We regret to inform you that your Amazon Mechanical Turk account has been suspended effective immediately. Your account was closed for use of robots, scripts, or other automated methods as a substitute for your human intelligence or independent judgment to perform tasks, which violates section 3b of our Participation Agreement. You can review the complete Participation Agreement at https://www.mturk.com/worker/participation-agreement

Once all of your submitted HITs have been approved or rejected, we will disburse your account balance to your primary disbursement method. If you have questions, or believe this decision was made in error, you may email us using the Contact Us form on our Worker website.

Regards, Amazon Mechanical Turk

 

[Metallica]

Does kinda seem like Stax is behind this eh? That's what people get for installing an extension without much thought, I suppose..

Also @Tjololo, thanks. It does look like they are going more in-depth with their reasoning now.. perhaps the large majority of the info I've scraped together is going obsolete.

 

[Metallica]

Update: until more is known about the Stax situation, I won't be providing information to anyone that PMs me about being suspended if it happened while Stax was installed on their browser.

Anyone who read the description of the extension knows what it is capable of and how it breaks the Terms of Service. I do not provide help to get just anyone unsuspended, I provide help to people who were unfairly suspended and need help fighting it.

 

[imGreek]

I had nothing but TurkMaster, Turk Opticon, and Dashboard Enhancer stuff installed. Out of all the emails I sent today, still haven't recieved anything back. Still haven't gotten an email explaining why it was suspended in the first place, like others have, before their account was suspended

 

[Metallica]

I had nothing but TurkMaster, Turk Opticon, and Dashboard Enhancer stuff installed. Out of all the emails I sent today, still haven't recieved anything back. Still haven't gotten an email explaining why it was suspended in the first place, like others have, before their account was suspended

They usually take 2-3 days to respond. It can be longer depending on what they've said to you before. (i.e., the false "we're done with you" message people eventually get)

 

[Peachy]

I wonder if Amazon is just being super sensitive blocking more accounts due to possible bot scares
or if Stax is behind some of these accounts

it sounds like I @imGreek was doing nothing wrong
according to his posts

this is very puzzling and concerning.

 

[Metallica]

I wonder if Amazon is just being super sensitive blocking more accounts due to possible bot scares
or if Stax is behind some of these accounts

it sounds like I @imGreek was doing nothing wrong
according to his posts

this is very puzzling and concerning.

I wasn't accusing him of using Stax. I was just stating that I won't be helping anyone that got suspended while using it until we know more about it. In his case, it probably has something more to do with false reasoning on Amazon's end.

 

[Peachy]

I wasn't accusing him of using Stax. I was just stating that I won't be helping anyone that got suspended while using it until we know more about it. In his case, it probably has something more to do with false reasoning on Amazon's end.

I wasn't accusing him of using Stax. just a general overview

I'm thinking you're probably right about false reasoning on Amazon's end